Posts Tagged ‘chess’
Apple markets its iPad as “The best way to experience the web, photos and video. Hands down.” But we can do all those things just fine on a laptop, so what’s the iPad’s real raison d’être? The answer, of course, is board games. The iPad seems custom designed to lie flat on a table and [...]
In his seminal, posthumously-published work, the Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure writes: “Of all the comparisons that might be imagined, the most fruitful is the one that might be drawn between the functioning of language and a game of chess. […] A game of chess is like an artificial realization of what language [...]
The history of chess-playing machines goes back at least as far as 1770. It was in that year that Baron von Kempelen first exhibited his “Turk”, a clockwork automaton that could play chess as well as the top human players of the day: The Baron’s new invention was wheeled into Court by an attendant and [...]
